Name: Journal of International Women's Studies Publisher: Bridgewater State College Audience: Academic; General Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: Sociology and social work; Women's issues/gender studies Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Bridgewater State
College ISSN:1539-8706

Issue:

Date: March 1, 2011 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 2

Accession Number:

260493691

Full Text:

In this special issue of the Journal of International Women's
Studies, the Feminist and Women's Studies Association (FWSA) is
pleased to present the winner and shortlisted entries from it's
annual student essay competition. The FWSA was founded in 1987 by a
group of women who were dedicated to researching and talking about
women's lives. As well as being a proactive presence around
feminist issues in the political, social and cultural sphere, the FWSA
sponsors a biennial international conference, a postgraduate seminar
series, as well as a celebrated book prize which recognises innovation
across disciplines in feminist and women's studies. The student
essay competition is an opportunity for early career academics to
enhance, extend and challenge feminist debates. Each year, the
competition attracts ambitious and talented individuals who deserve
commendation for their participation and efforts in developing and
pushing the boundaries of women's studies through imaginative
themes and interesting debate.

Seemingly anticipating the popular protests in Tunisia and Egypt
with which this year began, many of the essays in this special issue
turn to the question of resistance--one that has arguably been neglected
in the feminist focus on uncovering and theorising contexts of
oppression. In an uncertain moment of large-scale socio-political
transformation, forms of resistance have also changed demanding new
conceptions of political agency and indeed, new understandings of the
political itself. Through close ethnographic and textual readings of
women's everyday lives, these essays begin to map what feminist
philosopher, Patricia S. Mann has called a gendered
'micro-politics' embracing diverse forms of intersectional
agency and activism.

The winning entry by Teodora Todorova titled "Giving memory a
future: confronting the legacy of mass rape in post-conflict
Bosnia-Herzegovina' exemplifies such an endeavour. In the immediate
aftermath of the 1990s Balkan civil war, women's testimonies of
wartime rape have forced open the silence that surrounded this subject
especially the question of the children who were born as a result of
such inter-communal violence. Women's critical and reflective
cultural works--around which the discussion of the essay is centred--not
only provide an alternative reading of the legacy of mass rape in
post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina but also raise larger questions with
regard to the politics of remembrance, forgetting and reconciliation. In
making the silence of rape speak, women's testimonies provide an
alternative vision of a shared future based on recognition and therein,
the possibility of reconciliation.

Mika Pasanen's essay titled Visual Violations: The Ban on
Extreme Pornography, Politics of Representation, and the Discursive
Creation of 'Docile Bodies ', is a challenging and
thought-provoking entry. Pasanen looks at a Foucauldian concept of the
'docile body' as it is figured in extreme pornography. The
author examines how ideas about the 'docile body' come to be
represented and reinforced in law. Pasanen looks at a British law which
was passed in 2009 prohibiting the viewing and possessing of
'extreme pornography' as a case in point, asking key questions
about the production of sexuality in/through the family, and
pornography's relationship with the family, as well as the
problematic nature of the politics of representation and the realm of
the imagination. Pasanen gives attention to how the law aims to create
'docile bodies' through the control and regulation of the
'pornographic imagination', and queries whether this process
actually reiterates the discourse of sexuality found in the institution
of the family. An interesting discussion is conveyed here in which
Pasanen argues that the law is limited in its ability to create
'docile bodies' due to the nature of pornography that
eroticises the transgression of restrictions.

In 'Palestinian Women's Everyday Resistance: Between
Normality and Normalisation', Sophie Richter-Devroe presents a
fascinating account of the various coping strategies that Palestinian
women adopt in their everyday lives under physical and ideational
occupation. Richter-Devroe reads their seemingly banal practices of
travelling for leisure as a form of resistance aimed not only at the
Israeli control over physical and ideational spaces but also over
patriarchal control within Palestinian society. The very attempt at
reclaiming normalcy and pleasure through leisure trips becomes an act of
resistance in a context where neither seems possible. The definition of
resistance is itself expanded--beyond violence and martyrdom--and its
gendered 'micro-politics' are made salient in the manner in
which women's agential acts challenge patriarchal forms of control
exercised by secular-nationalist, religious-political and other actors
at national, family and community level.

Rosemary Langridge's entry, titled 'The Tearful Gaze in
Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth: Crying, Watching and Nursing' looks
engagingly at representations of the sexualised sinner as a Mary
Magdalene figure in literature. Focusing here on the female protagonist,
Ruth, Langridge looks at themes of redemption, emotional expression,
female sexuality and female pain and pleasure in the 19th century.
Giving attention to fallen tears in this novel, Langridge discusses the
significance they hold, over and above their simplistic, and perhaps
misleading, relation to the penitential tears of the Magdalene.
Interestingly, this essay looks at how expressions of emotion are bound
up with a gendered gaze and power relations. What happens when our
leading lady, in the midst of tears, looks back at observers? Langrige
notes Elizabeth Gaskell's call to empathy in this novel, and argues
that this draws attention away from some of the more challenging
questions raised by the tearful gaze.

Turning to the figure of the 'new mestiza' in
'Rearticulating the New Mestiza', Zalfa Feghali provides an
overview and critique of Gloria Anzaldua's influential theorization
of the new mestiza before providing a refiguration of the same. Feghali
shows the enormous political potential of this figure whose multiplicity
allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness
moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize
traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all
minority communities in order to achieve social and political change.
Pointing to some of the weaknesses in Anzaldfia's account--such as
the manner in which it ends up reinforcing the very borders it attempts
to transgress- Feghali asks for a broader, more inclusive and
transnational conceptualisation of the mestiza that could, in turn,
remobilise the conceptual force of hybridity and mestizaje in
contemporary thought.

Erika Kvistad discusses representations of death and Victorian
women by two esteemed authors in her essay titled 'What Happens, or
Rather Doesn't Happen': Death and Possibility in Alice James
and Christina Rossetti'. Kvistad is interested in the central role
of death in the work of Alice James and Christina Rossetti as a way of
articulating a space of possibility beyond what life has to offer. For
Kvistad, these authors write about death in a way which is neither
definitively conforming to nor subverting social norms about the links
between death and femininity. Kvistad offers a poignant and well
reasoned reading of these texts in which these death explorations create
a more complex conception of the role of women as active participant, as
well as victims of Victorian death culture, and of the strategies
available to women writers facing the problem of an existence that could
itself seem deathlike. We hope you enjoy reading this year's
competition winner and short-listed entries; we look forward to hearing
readers' responses to the essays featured in this special issue of
JIWS. For more information on the FWSA, and the student essay
competition in particular, please go to the FWSA website at
www.fwsa.org.uk.